Built on a Java/J2EE-based application in 1999, The Hartford's ($22.7 billion in revenue) original agency portal supported policy activities and a paperless workflow, according to Mike Stevens, assistant director of the EBC. "The old agent portal was updated in 2001 with robust service architecture to maximize real-time data, but agents could not immediately access transactions from the home page," he explains.

Taking Requests

The new EBC home page was designed based primarily on agent feedback, explains Brian Griffith, vice president of sales and marketing for The Hartford. "We asked agents how we could help them do their jobs more quickly and more productively," he relates. "Agents told us our page was congested." So the firm's e-business and technology staff went to work, making the page cleaner and more user friendly.

"To clean it up, we added more white space, news headlines, and tabs and hot links to tools to help agents manage their activity quickly and easily," Stevens relates. "Now, they can get into new transactions immediately."

To simplify agent workflow, The Hartford also included a Service Customers pull-down menu that provides agents with immediate access to all billing, claim and policy services. "One click gives agents the ease of doing business they were looking for," says Griffith.

According to Griffith, the new portal, which was released in October, has seen heavy usage and has garnered tremendously positive feedback. "Agents report that the ability to dive straight in from the home page is a major improvement," he says.

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